Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk · c. 1845–1875
Pioneers of Photography on and around Wandsworth Common: Part One
Welcome, everyone — and a particular welcome to our guests from the Barnes History Society and the Putney School of Arts photographic club, who join us tonight where history and photography combine very nicely. Philip Boys needs all the time available, so without further ado, over to Philip.
This talk is called Seeing and Believing, because the question comes up over and over again: are photographs real? Do they really show things you would otherwise have no idea about? Can you trust them?
I was not particularly interested in photography for its own sake, but I got drawn in through a passage I came across very early in my involvement with the Heritage Group. It is from John Buckmaster, one of the great science writers and teachers of the mid-nineteenth century, who lived around Wandsworth Common from the 1840s to the 1880s. Writing about the Common in the 1850s, he describes how it was fast melting away:
Private owners adjoining the Common were constantly making improvements by adding portions of the Common to their own property. The railways had enclosed acres not required or provided in the Acts to build the railway lines. Six acres were enclosed for a telescope which was never put up. Speculating builders turned a greedy eye on what remained, and here and there, like the scouts of an army, things called villas sprang up like mushrooms.
That phrase arrested me: “a telescope which was never put up.” I was deeply sceptical. So I went looking, and found the extraordinary website created by Greg Smyth — www.craigtelescope.co.uk — which demonstrates beyond any doubt that the Craig telescope did indeed stand on what is now called the Scope, on the other side of Trinity Road. It was the largest refracting telescope in the world in the 1850s. The best-known image of it appeared in The Illustrated London News in 1852 with the telling caption: “our engraving is from a photograph by Beard.” Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, when photographs could not be printed directly, they were already being used as source material for engravings — a theme that runs throughout this evening’s talk.
Greg and his team conducted a dig on the Common site using Time Team’s open-dig weekend in 2003 and established the approximate location of the tower. They found fragments but not much else; you might expect a structure of 220 tons and hundreds of thousands of bricks, standing over a hundred feet tall, to leave more behind. But the articles about the search provoked interest in the local community, and on 6 January 2004 — Greg’s birthday — an email arrived saying that a photograph of the telescope did exist. It had been taken by Geoffrey Bevington, a resident of Ivy House on the north side of Wandsworth Common, and it was tiny — only about 60 millimetres on a side — but showed remarkable detail right down to individual bricks in the tower.
That photograph, and the question of who Geoffrey Bevington was, is where this talk really begins.
Bevington lived at Ivy House, which stood on the north side of Wandsworth Common where Trinity Road meets the route across towards the Thames. It was a substantial house with a large garden. It was demolished and replaced by terraced houses around 1900; a V1 flying bomb hit the plot during the Second World War, leaving it derelict for about twenty years; it is now occupied by a block of flats called Alexandra Court.
The encyclopaedia of nineteenth-century photography notes that Bevington “managed to produce convincing photographic illustrations of workers engaged in their occupations in the 1860s,” and these are very highly valued in American and international museums, though little recognised in Britain. The family business — Bevington and Sons — was the largest leather factory in the world, certainly in Europe, for many years into the twentieth century. It was based in Bermondsey, and it smelt awful, because to make leather supple you need dog excrement in large quantities. The trade name for this substance was “pure” — perhaps an attempt at branding, or simply to put people off the scent, as it were. Henry Mayhew writes fascinatingly about the “pure finders” who collected it from the streets of London and brought it to Bevington’s and other tanneries.
Bevington made a celebrated series of photographs documenting each phase of leather production. They have a formal, almost painterly quality — the structure reminded me of Millet — and as we shall see, connections with the Pre-Raphaelite painters were very much part of this world.
At the V&A I found his work listed but almost entirely undigitised: 653 or so placeholder entries, only two or three of them filled. Thinking the V&A did not consider the work important enough, I went in person and was shown a large album — rather like a family bible — which had been given to the museum and had recently been conserved. I took photographs on a rather poor camera until my battery ran out. The album contains portraits of family members, still lives, holiday photographs, images of Ivy House, pictures of Fernside (the enormous house nearby whose grounds occupied roughly where Fernside Road now runs), and — most intriguingly — a photograph of the Black Sea taken when it was very low, and a view that is probably the earliest known photograph of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, just 200 yards from where we are sitting tonight, showing it with no trees around it and possibly not yet inhabited.
Bevington is always credited as the photographer of these images, but he must have had an assistant: he appears in many of them himself, always posing artfully. He also took stereoscopic images. He died at the very young age of thirty-four.
How did Bevington learn photography? He had a neighbour who was almost certainly his teacher: Peter Lenie Foster, who co-founded what became the Royal Photographic Society and who lived in Lake Terrace, just fifty yards from Ivy House on North Side. But it was through that connection that I found a second, earlier photographer whose work at Wandsworth Common predates Bevington’s: Hugh Welch Diamond.
Diamond lived locally from 1848 to 1856, when he was dismissed. He was superintendent of the women’s department at the Surrey Pauper Lunatic Asylum — what we know today as Springfield Hospital, built in 1840–41 — and he used photography in a way that was entirely new.
Diamond was a phrenologist and physiognomist: he believed that mental illness was registered in a patient’s bodily posture and facial expression, and that showing patients photographs of themselves — as an objective fact, an outsider’s view — would help them reflect on their condition. He also photographed patients over time, to document improvement or deterioration. He dressed them up, arranged their hair, sometimes gave them props or covered them with cloaks; each photograph was accompanied by a written note about the patient’s physical and mental state.
His approach was, by the standards of Bethlehem Hospital and what had come before, genuinely humane: no handcuffs, no chains, no degradation. But his photographs occupy a strange territory — at once clinical, artistic, and deeply ethically ambiguous. They are almost invariably held in art museums rather than medical collections, both in Britain and abroad, because their power as images far exceeds their value as medical records.
Some of the most striking show patients posed as Ophelia — the archetypal “mad woman” of the Victorian imagination — with flowers in their hair and distant expressions. His most famous photograph shows an older woman in a hat, hands folded in her lap, cradling a dead bird with a long beak. The same woman appears in multiple sessions; in the engraved version made from the photograph (since photographs could not be printed directly), the crucifix around her neck is still visible, and she is described as “a religious melancholic.” A sequence of four engravings shows another patient through the stages of puerperal mania: “melancholy,” “excited,” “convalescent,” and finally “recovered” — indicated, in the visual rhetoric of Victorian respectability, by the wearing of a bonnet.
Diamond’s work is almost unknown in Britain, though highly regarded in America and France. This seems worth rectifying.
There is also a cautionary note. Philip came across an image attributed to Diamond online — “portrait of an unidentified asylum patient, circa 1850s” — and it struck him as odd. Following up every link, he eventually found a discussion thread that revealed it was a photograph of an actress named Serena Safir, commissioned by the author Wendy Wallace for a book trailer for her novel The Painted Bridge. A reverse image search had traced it back to Wallace’s now-defunct website, where the earliest posting of the image was June 2014. It looked entirely convincing as a Victorian photograph. The lesson: the more powerful the tools for creating images, the more scepticism “seeing and believing” requires.
Peter Lenie Foster was a close friend of Diamond’s from their schooldays in Norfolk, and both were founding figures of the Royal Photographic Society. Foster went on to run the Royal Society of Arts brilliantly. On his way to work in the Strand each day he would have passed the construction of Cleopatra’s Needle; he photographed its erection, as well as Waterloo Bridge and the newly built Hammersmith Bridge. These are significant documentary photographs.
Through this circle comes Roger Fenton, the greatest British photographer of the mid-nineteenth century. He is most famous for his photographs of the Crimean War — the first sustained photographic record of a conflict — though he arrived after the Charge of the Light Brigade (October 1854) and began photographing in January 1855, working from a converted photographic van driven by his assistant Marcus Sparling. The logistics were formidable: the wet collodion process required plates to be coated, exposed and developed within a matter of minutes.
Diamond left the Springfield Asylum in 1856 under a cloud — dismissed, rather ignominiously, for reasons that are not entirely clear from the record. But his photographs of the patients there remain, and they raise the central question of the talk: what are we seeing when we look at a photograph? Diamond believed a photograph showed objective truth. He also believed he could see mental illness in a face or a posture. Both beliefs were, in their different ways, kinds of faith — forms of “seeing and believing” that photographs were thought to make possible.
The fake image of the supposed asylum patient, entirely convincing to the modern eye, is a reminder that this faith has always been partly misplaced. Photography has never been simply a record of what was there. From the very beginning — from Diamond dressing his patients and arranging their hair, from Fenton composing his Crimean scenes after the event — the photograph has been a made thing as much as a found one.
A brief but important connection: the Pre-Raphaelite painter Arthur Hughes lived in Elspeth Road, just across West Side from the common. He painted water obsessively — the Lady of Shalott from Tennyson’s poem, Ophelia on the water — and the timing and location strongly suggest to Philip (though he cannot prove it) that Hughes knew Diamond, that they talked about women’s madness and its representation, and that the Black Sea — just nearby — inspired or at least sustained his passion for these watery, melancholy subjects.
Lewis Carroll was a family friend who bought paintings from Hughes and took photographs of the Hughes children in the garden — informal, rather charming pictures. The Hughes family were part of a dense network of people who knew each other, took photographs of each other, wrote about each other, and between them created an extraordinary record of life on and around Wandsworth Common in the 1850s, 60s and 70s.
The 1870s and 1880s saw a rapid proliferation of commercial photographic studios around the common and in the nearby streets. One of the most interesting practitioners was Henry Morris, who had a studio at Lordship Terrace, Battersea Rise, “opposite the Freemasons’ School” (where the Peabody Estate now stands), and also at New Wandsworth station — roughly where North Side meets Battersea Rise and Windmill Drive.
Morris comes into focus because of Kalulu. When Philip noticed that a photograph of Kalulu at the National Portrait Gallery was attributed simply to “Henry Morris,” with no further information, he reasoned that since the school Kalulu had attended was in Wandsworth, with a bit of luck Morris might be a local photographer. And so he was. The backs of his cartes-de-visite advertise “new cameo vignettes taken with patent apparatus — H. Morris, artist and photographer” and, on one example, “by appointment to Her Majesty’s Government.” Philip believes Morris photographed the inmates of Wandsworth Prison in the early 1870s — a substantial collection exists, which he had unfortunately omitted from the PDF for this evening and will cover in a future Chronicles article.
Morris died young. But among the cartes-de-visite he left behind — about twenty or thirty of which Philip has found — are arresting images of families and individuals who lived around Wandsworth Common in the early 1870s. Almost none of them are named, only initialled. The formal poses, the draped curtains, the carefully placed books and letters, the vignetted portraits — all are characteristic of commercial studio photography of the period. One woman with a particularly fine smile is identified only as “Uncle Alfred.” Who they all were is, for the most part, still unknown.
Could you remind us what the Black Sea was, and why there was a windmill? Wandsworth Common in the mid-nineteenth century was chiefly famous for a very beautiful lake, rather larger than the lake we have today, which lay where Spencer Park now is and projected forward some way towards the path that runs from the railway bridge. Originally it may have been a quarry or reservoir, but it was beautified and much admired — described as beautiful, always, until the last years when it was allowed to become smelly and stagnant.
When the railway line to Waterloo was cut through the Common in the late 1830s, it severed the water supply. The Common was famously wet — botanists and naturalists came specifically for that reason — and the slope of the land meant that water drained into the Black Sea from a wide catchment. The railway cut this off. The man who leased the house there was a very rich man: George Ferguson Wilson, owner of Price’s Patent Candle Works. He loved his plants and his water. He sued the London and South Western Railway for cutting the supply and forced them to pay for a water pump — which is the windmill. It was not a grain mill; it pumped water from below the railway line to continue feeding the lake. Wilson eventually moved away, sold his property, and bought what became the Royal Horticultural Society garden at Wisley. If you visit Wisley, you can sense Wandsworth Common in its abundance of water, streams and lakes: he grew up here and wanted to replicate that environment.
Are there plans for the V&A to digitise the Bevington album? The V&A do not always reply promptly to such suggestions, and when they do it can be rather opaque. They would probably welcome someone coming with a decent camera to photograph every page; it would not take enormously long. The album is particularly valuable for those of us who live around Wandsworth Common because it contains images of the Common, the houses and the people, as well as other interesting locations. Philip has ideas about who several of the initialled figures are, and it would be wonderful to be able to confirm or disprove them. The case for digitising it properly is strong; the will to do so, so far, is not.
How was the Craig telescope mounted, and who actually used it? The telescope took a long time to build, and the lens — as Henry Mayhew records in a remarkable interview with the man who made it — was ground too quickly and not to a sufficient standard of flatness. Even being only 1/5000th of an inch off true was enough to cause fuzziness across parts of the image. The telescope was also extremely difficult to manoeuvre: swinging that immensely heavy tube to a new position was very slow work. There was considerable excitement about the rings of Saturn — they claimed to have discerned the number of rings — but how reliable that observation was is debatable. Craig bankrupted himself and the telescope fell out of use. The land, even after the structure was demolished, remained sequestered from the Common until 1871, when it was finally returned.
This talk was originally conceived as a single piece on Paul Martin, an internationally recognised photographer of the 1890s who lived at several addresses in Battersea and Wandsworth, and who opened a studio on Bellevue Road — an astonishing red-brick building which I think is still the finest on that street. Martin went into business with a partner named Doret, whose work in their joint studio is well worth examining in its own right.
Among the photographs known to have come from the Doret-Martin studio are portraits of Edward Thomas, the poet, with his wife and children — rather precious images. There are also some very fine photographs of Wandsworth Common itself: made by real artists who brought a genuinely different eye to the place from anything we have seen tonight. There is an interesting analogy: just as they photographed the people who lived around the Common a hundred years ago, we have recently made a film about people who live around the Common today. The impulse is the same; only the technology has changed.
I also owe you a section on the photographic record of Wandsworth Prison, which was accidentally left out of tonight’s presentation and which I hope to cover in a future Chronicles article.
Thank you, Philip — as usual, a tour de force of meticulous research. Who would have thought we would start with the Craig telescope and end up with Dr Livingstone? We look forward to Part Two.